Noli me tangere

Bartholomeus Spranger spent most of his life at one of the strangest courts in Europe. From the 1580s he served Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, a ruler who cared more for painting, astronomy and curiosities than for governing, and who gathered artists to feed his taste for the elegant and the sensual. Spranger gave him a Northern Mannerism of long polished limbs and figures turned into graceful, twisting poses. The subject here comes from the gospel account of Easter morning. Mary Magdalene, finding the tomb empty, mistakes the risen Christ for a gardener and reaches toward him, and he tells her not to cling to him, the words that give the scene its Latin name. Even in a sacred moment Spranger keeps the charged, elongated grace that his imperial patron in Prague loved.